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The PAC to End All PACs

It’s not lost on Jonathan Soros that the crusade he is now engaged in raises eyebrows for one very obvious reason. “I don’t want to make a big deal out of this, but I do need to be honest about the role my family has played on the other side of this,” Soros tells me as a secretary brings him a crystal decanter of water and a single shot of espresso in a paper cup. To be fair, Soros says, his father is less involved today in “partisan politics” than he was a decade ago, when he helped bankroll the Democrats’ presidential ambitions. Soros concedes that his family’s donations that year went a long way toward changing the relationship between politicians and big-money donors. “If Citizens United changed norms, so did 2004, in full honesty and full disclosure,” he admits.

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The problem with the current regime, as Soros sees it, is not that people can spend unlimited amounts of money. Money, he points out, isn’t the determining factor in most elections; and besides, the Supreme Court, most recently in its Citizens United decision, more or less settled the question of whether or not rich guys can spend unlimited amounts in political campaigns. The problem, rather, is that some candidates don’t have enough of it to even get a foothold and become viable candidates. Public financing, Soros believes, will solve that.

“Getting money out of politics is not an achievable objective,” he says. “There is always a way. You can increase the transaction cost, you can make it harder, you can do all sorts of things, but if you have money and you want to influence an electoral outcome, there will be a way. You take it away from the candidates, it goes to the parties. You take it away from the parties, it goes to the independents. You take it away from the independents, and somebody buys Fox News or a newspaper or something that is subject to a different exemption. You can’t get the money out of politics, but you can reduce its influence significantly by breaking the dependence candidates have on big money.”

In other words, if a deep-pocketed donor wanted to give money to an interest group to support a cause, and then watch as the group advocates for a certain candidate, fine. But independent organizations need to remain independent from candidates, Soros says. And to ensure an end to the wink-wink methods by which super PACs work with candidates requires stronger election law enforcement, he says. Candidates themselves, Soros thinks, should be forced to raise small dollar contributions and have those funds matched with public money.

There is broad support for these measures, even among Republicans. But such plans have a tendency to run aground when it comes to the question of how to pay for them; the public seems to have very little appetite to shell out tax dollars to underwrite campaigns. “There is no support for this at all. Almost every time it goes to the ballot it loses,” says Bradley Smith, a professor of law at Capital University and a former commissioner with the Federal Election Commission. “Public polls that show support are very sensitive to how the question is worded.”

Smith points out that if the taxpayers end up financing campaigns, the nature of campaigning could be perverted. “It means every campaign decision becomes a public policy matter because you can’t have people wasting money. And you are going to get an ever-growing government grip on political debate that you don’t want.”

Friends of Democracy mostly soft-pedals the funding mechanism in favor of the benefits public financing would bring: a government more responsive to its citizens than to the influence of oligarchs. If rich people want to put money into political causes, Soros thinks, the law should be far more restrictive in keeping them from coordinating with specific candidates.

“I don’t think Shelly Adelson should be able to invite Mitt Romney or Newt Gingrich to Las Vegas and tell them whatever and have them kiss the ring and then turn around and give $10 million to a super PAC that is endorsed by the candidate,” Soros says. “I think there is something wrong there. But if he wanted to spend his money independently the way [Michael] Bloomberg or [Tom] Steyer or whoever else is doing it—totally independently—then you really are just adding to the frame of ideas.”

Which is what Soros is trying to do with his pet cause. In 2012, the eight races his PAC got involved in were closely contested races where they drove home the message that their guy was for reform, and the other guy was not. In one typical television ad the Soros group paid to run, a family sits down by the dugout in an empty baseball stadium to watch a game, only to be told that those seats, and every other seat between the field and the nosebleed section are already in reserve.

Despite his passion for the project, Soros’s financial commitment to the cause is purposefully modest. He’s trying now to enlist other well-heeled donors to join him. “I said from the start that I will give no more than $1 million to the political work,” he says. “And the reason for that is that even if I had enough money, which I don’t, this can’t be a one-person issue. There are a lot of people who care about this issue, but they don’t see the possibility for change and the possibility of success.”

One curious potential bedfellow that Soros has hit up is Sheldon Adelson, the casino magnate who spent around $100 million in the 2012 presidential election, and has more recently said he doesn’t think he should be allowed to spend as freely as he’s able to. Adelson insists he spends so much because George Soros does. According to Jonathan Soros, Adelson hasn’t committed to join him. (A representative for Adelson declined to comment.)

Getting conservative donors on board is a key part of the Soros plan—as is finding Republican candidates in contested primaries who are willing to join the cause. Since many would be leery of accepting money from anything with the name Soros on it, Friends of Democracy’s plan is to find other organizations on the ground that are less toxic to conservatives, and funnel the money to the candidates through them. “The thing we need to be cognizant of is, because of my association with this entity and my—whether true or not—the expectation of my political beliefs, we may not be the best messenger for these races,” Soros admits.

This will be hard. Campaign finance reform is widely perceived as a Democratic issue. Or at least, despite the non-partisan sheen, something that is often a front for one political party or another.

This is true in the fight in New York too, where Soros hopes that Cuomo keeps the reform measure in his budget despite pressure from Republican opponents in the legislature and pessimism about its chances of creating real change. “A lot of what we are facing is an obstacle of conventional wisdom,” Soros says. “It is one of the reasons that New York is so essential in this time frame. The sooner we have a win the better. We are trying to demonstrate that this affects candidates’ ability to get elected.”

Cuomo, he says, seems to be pushing the issue without fully embracing it: “He is at the very last place he can possibly go.” And now he can push no further. The deadline for a budget deal is next week.

David Freedlander is senior political correspondent with The Daily Beast. Follow him on Twitter @Freedlander.